Expensify's David Barrett Talks 2017 – and Beyond

David Barrett, CEO, Expensify

David Barrett is the CEO and founder of the expense management company Expensify.

Editor's Note: This is the first in a series of exclusive interviews with some of the accounting industry's leading executives and thought leaders.

David Barrett started programming at the age of 6. Ever since, he has been aspiring to become an expense report magnate. Ask him, and he'll tell you straight up that he hates expense reports. Hates them.

His life work, aside from being married to an opera singer, spending time with the world's cutest beagle, miles of third world travel and fine wine, is dedicated to the proposition that you won't hate the act of the expense report, too.

The road to Expensify was paved with a career pursuing his love of all things technical. At the University of Michigan, he worked in the Virtual Reality Lab, before moving to Texas to write 3D graphics engines for the video game industry. Next, he moved to California to join Travis Kalanick in building a peer-to-peer file transfer technology called Red Swoosh, which was acquired by Akamai in 2007.

In 2008, David left Akamai to start Expensify – the first step in helping relieve the world of that treaded question: "Did you turn in your expense report yet?

Insightful Accountant sat down with David to get his thoughts on what the New Year holds, and what every accountant should expect from Expensify moving forward:

What are three things every accountant should expect in 2017?

I think 2017 is the year that every modern accountant will see their most "never cloud" client ask about the cloud. They're going to switch away from hourly pricing (which encourages low-grade grunt work) and to value pricing (which encourages top-grade advisory work.) And they're going to start to standardize all their clients on a single cloud-based technology stack in which they develop a deep expertise.

How do you think the accounting landscape will change in 2017?

I think we'll see consolidation of some of the smaller cloud vendors as the next natural step of a maturing market. It's become very difficult to differentiate with basic web or even mobile functionality, meaning the key players will increasingly turn to cutting edge machine-learning and AI features to do more than merely "digitize" your paper workflow, but enable a first-ever, truly "digital" workflow.

Define how AI will continue to transform the marketplace.

Anything that can be broken down to a series of very crisp rules that need to be executed reliably and at scale will ultimately be taken over by AI. This means anything involving raw data entry or route execution of defined procedures is ripe for automation – not immediately, but increasingly over time. Accordingly, anybody whose business currently depends on this sort of activity will need to move their business up market toward more advanced advisory work, otherwise they'll soon be out of business.

What are the best ways to for accountants and vendors to build work together and partnerships?

Partnerships are ultimately just relationships, and relationships are a function of time and engagement. The key to working together is for accountants to be very clear about which vendors they ultimately want to focus on. This enables the vendors in turn to focus on and optimize for them in return.

Expanding our Concierge AI to be a fully capable bookkeeper for the millions of businesses that have none. Currently, Concierge handles receipt transcription, duplication detection, policy enforcement and other rule-based bookkeeping processes. And this year, we're expanding Concierge's natural language processing capabilities to handle the full range of real-world exceptions that every business encounters.